25th
Day 40- off to the villages!
Today Misheala stayed home sick with a little bit of a tummyache, so I had to venture into the big world by myself…
Got to school and took a test that was WAY hard!!! It was really tragic, but one of those things that happens sometimes when you’re learning a foreign language, I guess.
Today we were scheduled to go into the north and go to a museum and wedding, but at lunch everyone decided that they definitely did not want to do that… Mina, Feras, and I still wanted to go, so instead of 8 of us going, there were only 3! We were a little bit aprehensive, but it ended up being wonderful!
We drove to the North, and stopped at a small museum—while Dr. al-Masri spoke with the owner, Mina, Feras and I just sort of wandered around and took pictures of all the Random Stuff that was in it. It was neat though, because it was actually a traditional Jordanian house that was built in 1789, so it was tiny and absolutely filled to the brim with Jordanian antiques (and some oddities)
After our museum stop, we went closer to the city Irbid, where we stopped to pick up Dr. al-Masri’s son (he’s 3yr7mo old- soooo cute!) We continued on our way, and all of a sudden we noticed that we weren’t in the desert anymore, it was all beautiful mountains, covered with olive trees. We opened all the windows to the bus and it smelled SOOO good! it was a really nice temperature outside too, so we just drove the rest of the way without air conditioning. (although, Dr. al-Masri informed us later, it wasn’t really a choice, because when the bus is going up tall hills there’s two choices: a.) air conditioning, or b.) making it up the hill. Luckily we unknowingly chose b…)
Once we arrived at one of the small villages, they showed us how bread is traditionally made. It was so neat because there was an older woman sitting in this HOT! room over a furnace built into the ground. She had a huge bowl of dough next to her, and in 10 minutes of watching we saw her make 5 or 6 breads! She would make dough balls with her hands, put them in flour, cover the tops in olive oil, flatten them with her hands (think pizza crusts) and then stick the round into the oven! (with her hands!) then she’d wait a few minutes and just pull it out. One of them she pulled out and handed to us! We ate it with homemade olive oil and it was soooo yummy!
Something funny that I didn’t realize until Mina pointed it out, was that I was probably the first ‘white’ person that the kids had seen in real life. All of the village children wanted to follow us and talk to us and see what we were all about. Some of the boys were troublemakers, and as we were watching her make bread, crawled up to the roof (where they apparently keep pigeons) and threw one at us!! We squealed and everyone giggled at us, but it was all in good fun.
After we watched bread-making, the girls got to go to a bride’s party, where we danced with all of the women and they put henna on our hands! Something we didn’t realize was that after they dabbed it on our palms and fingers we were supposed to rub our hands together- we didn’t know though, so we ended up with hands that look tie-dyed!
We went from there to the house of Dr. al-Masri’s sister, where we met most of his family, ate a delicious dinner, and sat on the roof to enjoy the sunset. From the roof, as the sun went down, you could see the lights of Jerusalem in the distance, which we thought was really neat! Mina and Feras drank about 400 cups of tea and coffee, so they were pretty awake!
Once night prayers were over, the men’s dubka (a type of dance, there’s video of it eariler in blog) party began. Feras went with all of the men, and we were supposed to follow behind with all of the women. We went to a rooftop overlooking the party and all of a sudden I was MOBBED by little girls who wanted to touch my hair and my face. They ALL wanted to take pictures with me, and put their hijabs on me- it was really strange! We had fun though, and towards the end of the night, a group of little girls grabbed my hands and we did dubka on the rooftop overlooking the town!
All in all, a very successful day- on the way home, we stopped at another sister of Dr. al-Masri’s house and he got us a lot of home-made olive oil! yum!!! It was VERY nice to get out of the city…
